In what’s being billed as an unprecedented global law enforcement response to cybercrime, federal investigators in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe today say they’ve dismantled a sprawling cybercrime machine known as “Avalanche” — a distributed, cloud-hosting network that for the past seven years has been rented out to fraudsters for use in launching countless malware and phishing attacks. (Krebs on Security)

Of calls from North America and Europe, the ones to Cuba are the most likely to be fraudulent in some way, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association’s 2015 global survey. (The Atlantic)

China has recovered more than 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) of illegal assets since launching a fraud investigation into an online lending platform, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the Beijing public security bureau as saying. (Reuters)

Dozens of Wells Fargo employees filed whistleblower complaints with the federal government, alleging the company retaliated against them for raising red flags about corporate and consumer financial fraud. (NBC Bay Area)

The former chief financial officer of British software company Autonomy has been indicted on U.S. charges of engaging in a fraudulent scheme to deceive investors and Hewlett Packard about his firm’s performance before its sale in 2011. (Fortune)

A London-based trader on Wednesday became the second person convicted of criminally spoofing U.S. futures markets, after he pleaded guilty to federal charges that he contributed to Wall Street's 2010 "flash crash" by using the manipulative trading practice. (CNBC)

The prosecution will call nine witnesses in its case against former BSI banker Yeo Jiawei - the first person to be tried for the key role he allegedly played in a massive money laundering operation linked to scandal-hit 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) fund. (Straits Times)

The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program wants Congress to pass legislation that forces Wall Street CEOs to come out of the shadows and swear there’s no fraud or illegal activity in their organizations. (MarketWatch)

When investigators started examining a South Florida convenience store's receipts, they figured it was either uncommonly popular with food stamp recipients or the owner was operating a fraud. (Sun Sentinel)

The former chief executive of defunct drug company Inyx has been charged in connection with a fraud scheme that caused more than $100 million in losses and led to the collapse of one of Puerto Rico's largest banks, the U.S. Justice Department said. (CNBC)

The European Union's anti-fraud body is investigating Syria aid projects, officials said, after a similar U.S. probe exposed bribery and fraud in some of its humanitarian assistance in the war-torn state. (Reuters)

Top senators angered by the exorbitant cost of the EpiPen, produced by Mylan, are expanding their inquiry to federal health regulators to discern whether the drug company knowingly and improperly paid state Medicaid programs less than it should have. (Washington Post)

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said his country would cooperate with U.S. and other international authorities investigating the misappropriation of funds from a Malaysian state-owned fund that he founded. (Channel NewsAsia)

The lawsuit, brought under federal and state False Claims Acts by a senior manager who worked at the agency for 16 years, charges that the Visiting Nurse Service of New York has systematically extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid through falsified and improper billings, while shortchanging needy patients of the care their doctors ordered. (New York Times)

“There are a lot of articles out there right now trying to understand the issue,” he wrote me. “But very few, if any, are actually mentioning the ways in which this could have been easily prevented if the management…had been properly informed and/or cared, and why they didn’t.” (Forbes)

Wells Fargo reached a settlement with the Los Angeles prosecutor and federal regulators who accused the lender of pushing customers into multiple, fee-generating accounts that they never requested. (CNBC)

The court affirmed a lower court's 2012 ruling that Sondhi Limthongkul violated Securities and Exchange Commission regulations in 1996-97 by presenting fraudulent financial data to obtain a large bank loan for one of his businesses. (ABC)

Former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac was the face of the country’s fight against tax evaders – until he was forced to admit he himself was dodging taxes, hiding money in secret accounts around the world. (Euronews)

The Australian consumer watchdog said it had sued the Australian arm of world No. 2 carmaker Volkswagen AG for intentionally selling more than 57,000 vehicles with software which lied about levels of toxic emissions. (Reuters)

The report includes summaries of investigations of what happened in the latter half of 2014 through April 2015 and in 2016. The cases include missing technology equipment, missing money, fraudulent transcripts provided by an employee at the time of hire and payroll over-payments. (Detroit Free Press)

Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP has settled a $5.5 billion lawsuit in the middle of a weekslong trial over its alleged failure to catch the massive fraud that led to one of the most expensive bank failures in U.S. history. (Wall Street Journal)

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged 71 municipal bond issuers, including the states of Hawaii and Minnesota, as well as related entities, for using offering documents that misled investors. (Fortune)

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up. (Reuters)

A pair of security researchers recently uncovered a Nigerian scammer ring that they say operates a new kind of attack called “wire-wire” after a few of its members accidentally infected themselves with their own malware. (IEEE Spectrum)

In the latest fallout from Dallas-based AT&T's "cramming" practices, the company will have to pay $7.75 million in reimbursements and penalties to settle a case involving a third-party directory assistance service. (Dallas News)

Three former senior bankers were sent to prison for their roles in concealing the loss of billions in deposits at the defunct Anglo Irish Bank, the biggest accounting fraud in Irish corporate history. (ABC)

In the outcome of a closely watched trial that could set precedent, convicted futures trader Michael Coscia was sentenced in federal court to three years in prison and two years of supervised release for spoofing and commodities fraud. (Chicago Tribune)

U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown of Florida and her chief of staff pleaded not guilty to multiple fraud charges and other federal offenses in a grand jury indictment unsealed after an investigation into what prosecutors call a phony charity turned into a personal slush fund. (ABC)

Cases of older Americans being taken advantage of by telemarketers, investment professionals or even members of their own family are a common and growing problem that occurs mostly under the radar, advocates say. (CNBC)

Ukraine’s parliament stripped a lawmaker of his immunity and allowed his arrest on charges of misappropriating more than $60 million, the first high-profile anti-corruption case since promises of a renewed crackdown from President Petro Poroshenko. (Bloomberg)

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Breitling Energy Corp, its chief executive and seven other people with defrauding investors out of around $80 million by misleading them about the value of oil and gas assets. (Fortune)

Nasdaq, Inc. has been checking up on the companies it lists much more closely since a 2009 boom of China-based companies using its exchange abruptly crashed in 2011, creating a massive fraud pile-up. (MarketWatch)

U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Robert Gilbeau pleaded guilty to a felony charge of lying to federal investigators about his extensive relationship with a foreign defense contractor who's at the heart of a sweeping bribery and fraud scandal. (NPR)

That's according to a new report from the World Federation of Advertisers, which estimates that within the next decade, fake Internet traffic schemes will become the second-largest market for criminal organizations behind cocaine and opiate trafficking. (Mashable)

Hours before the Federal Reserve Bank of New York approved four fraudulent requests to send $81 million from a Bangladesh Bank account to cyberthieves, the Fed branch blocked those same requests because they lacked information required to transfer money,. (CNBC)

Former American International Group CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg must stand trial for allegedly orchestrating sham transactions at the insurer, New York's top court ruled, as the long-time financial industry titan failed in his 11-year-old quest to escape civil fraud charges. (Reuters)

U.S. and Dutch authorities have moved to halt alleged international mail fraud schemes suspected of bilking millions of dollars from elderly and vulnerable victims in the U.S. and around the world. (USA Today)

Insider trading and official corruption prosecutions—two of the cornerstones of recent white-collar enforcement efforts by the Department of Justice—have both generated sufficient doctrinal confusion to land them on the Supreme Court’s docket this year and next. (Forbes)

Nearly $1 billion of European Union funds were given out to fraudulent claimants last year, with the biggest concentrations of suspected false claims in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, data from EU investigators shows. (Reuters UK)

Countrywide may have pumped billions of dollars worth of shoddy mortgages through the pipeline that ended with the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but that wasn’t necessarily fraud, a federal appeals court has ruled. (Forbes)

In many cases, whistleblowers located outside of the United States are best positioned to uncover schemes involving fraudulent bills submitted to the U.S. government, tax evasion, and/or securities fraud involving U.S. companies. (Huffington Post)

JPMorgan Chase & Co won dismissal of a lawsuit brought by former customers of Bernard Madoff who blamed the U.S. bank for playing an active role in his Ponzi scheme and ignoring red flags of his fraud. (Reuters)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "actual fraud," as it relates to the discharge of debt under the bankruptcy code, may be committed by purposeful concealment and does not require overt misrepresentation. (Jurist)

FIFA’s head of audit and compliance, Domenico Scala, quit Saturday to protest changes at the top of global soccer’s governing body that he said will imperil efforts to eliminate corruption. (Bloomberg)

The person who claims to have disclosed the Panama Papers, a trove of financial data that has implicated politicians and business leaders around the world in large-scale tax evasion, issued a statement explaining the motives behind the massive leak. (Japan Times)

The presidential panel set up by President Muhammadu Buhari through the Office of the National Security Adviser to probe arms procurement between 2007 and 2015 has allegedly uncovered massive fraud in the Nigerian Army. (Sahara Reporters)

SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, warned its customers that it was aware of “a number of recent cyber incidents” where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system. (Fortune)

A Pennsylvania man who allegedly schemed with former officials at Caldwell University was charged with plotting to defraud a program that funded the education of veterans who served in the armed forces following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. (NJ.com)

Two of Vermont’s most prominent businessmen, Jay Peak Resort owner Ariel Quiros and president Bill Stenger, were accused last week of securities fraud and misuse of more than $200 million raised from investors since 2008. (Boston Globe)

The booming business of filing whistleblowing claims against government contractors came to the U.S. Supreme Court today as the justices debated exactly what constitutes fraud under the Civil War-era False Claims Act. (Forbes)

The new chip-enabled cards flowing into the U.S. marketplace have already made a dent in fraud, with some of the biggest merchants seeing a dip of more than 18% in counterfeit transactions, according to Visa. (USA Today)

Papua New Guinea police officers have reportedly barricaded the office of the head of an anti-fraud squad after a court threw out his suspension, in a dramatic escalation of a long-running corruption saga engulfing the country’s leadership. (Guardian)

An elected official of a New York City suburb was charged with defrauding investors who helped finance a controversial minor league baseball stadium, in what authorities called the first criminal securities fraud prosecution involving municipal bonds. (Reuters)

A jury convicted a Dallas-area doctor of fraud for allegedly "selling his signature" to process almost $375 million in false Medicare and Medicaid claims in what investigators called the biggest home health care fraud case in the history of both programs. (ABC)

Anyone with doubts as to just how serious the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is about fraud or indeed its office finds them dispelled as soon as they try to enter its headquarters on the western edge of Trafalgar Square. (Telegraph)

A man described by a Florida federal judge as the boss of a $100 million-plus "fraud factory" that used thousands of stolen identities to illegally obtain income tax refunds was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison. (CBS)

Chicago Bulls legend Scottie Pippen was near the end of his storied 17-year NBA career when he invested more than $20 million with a financial adviser he says had come highly recommended by the team. (Chicago Tribune)

A mother and daughter have been held in China after police uncovered a £61 million trade in illegal vaccines, potentially exposing patients to dangerous drugs in what appears the country’s biggest case of its kind. (Telegraph)

This type of fraud cost global business more than $1.2 billion over the past two years, the FBI reported late last summer, and the number of victims increased by 270 percent during the first eight months of 2015. The average loss per scam was $130,000. (CSO)

A former vice chairman of the Oklahoma Senate's Finance Committee was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison Friday after admitting he stole $1.8 million from the nonprofit agency where he worked for 16 years. (ABC)

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission moved decisively into the Aequitas Capital Management scandal Thursday, suing the Lake Oswego company and three top executives for allegedly running a $350 million Ponzi scheme. (Oregonian)

A major phishing scheme has tricked several major companies — among them, the messaging service Snapchat and disk-drive maker Seagate Technology — into relinquishing tax documents that exposed their workers' incomes, addresses and Social Security numbers. (ABC)

The Securities and Exchange Commission said the San Francisco bank failed to disclose an important financial gap facing Schilling's startup, 38 Studios, to bond investors who lost money in the high-profile 2012 collapse. (USA Today)

A court in southern China has jailed 24 people for fraudulently raising nearly 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in one of the country's biggest financial scams, the official Xinhua news agency said. (Reuters)

A veteran former compliance officer at the University of Louisville says in a lawsuit that President James Ramsey and his lieutenants tried to squelch enforcement of conflict of interest rules, including in a case involving Ramsey himself. (Louisville Courier-Journal)

Citigroup Inc. was sued for fraud by investors and creditors of a bankrupt Mexican oil services firm over claims they were harmed by a loan scheme that also led the bank to cut 2013 profit by $235 million and fire at least a dozen people. (Bloomberg)

The Swiss bank UBS is under scrutiny by the Belgian authorities over accusations of money laundering and fraud in an inquiry into whether the bank assisted wealthy individuals in avoiding taxes. (New York Times)

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s push to step up policing of accounting fraud could have a lasting impact on the agency’s work, bringing more cases related to poor internal controls and more actions against individuals, a top former official said. (Wall Street Journal)

Seven instances of publicly reported fraud have been committed by nonprofit executive directors within Waco charities the past eight years. This is a shocking statistic but serves as a reminder that fraud happens, even in our community. (Waco Tribune-Herald)

Here’s how leading fraud researchers, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and computer scientists think technology can be put to work to fight fraud however it occurs — in person, online, or over the phone. (Atlantic)

Chinese police arrested 21 employees at China’s largest online finance business on suspicion of fleecing 900,000 investors for $7.6 billion, in what could be the biggest financial fraud in Chinese history. (USA Today)

Two major global banks, Barclays and Credit Suisse, are paying a combined $154.3 million to settle government investigations that they misled clients about being able to safely trade on their "dark pool" financial exchanges. (ABC)

Caesars Entertainment’s court-appointed examiner has told company officials and creditors’ lawyers he believes the company acted improperly when it transferred assets away from the hobbled casino prior to putting it into Chapter 11. (New York Post)

The total value of fraud cases that reached U.K. courts was more than 732 million pounds ($1.04 billion) in 2015, up 15 million pounds from the previous year, with society’s most poor and vulnerable persistently targeted by criminals, according to a report. (Bloomberg)

Zhong raised at least $8.5 million from Chinese investors through the U.S. EB-5 visa program and improperly used some of it on personal expenses such as luxury cars, a home and a boat, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a civil complaint against her. (CNBC)

On top of less than stellar holiday sales, retailers also are expected to see return fraud grow from $1.9 billion in the 2014 holiday cycle to $2.2 billion this year, according to the National Retail Federation. (Talk Business)

A landmark fraud trial opened Monday for Spain's Princess Cristina, accused of helping bankroll a lavish lifestyle with funds her husband received from an alleged scheme to embezzle about 6 million euros ($6.5 million) in public contracts for conferences and sporting events. (U.S. News And World Report)

Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. (On The Wire)

An ex-partner in the Chicago office of McKinsey and a former internal consultant at State Farm have been indicted on fraud charges for allegedly billing $890,000 in false consulting and travel expenses. (Chicago Business)